"Michael MacDougall is a talented trauma surgeon whose life in Seattle is slowly unraveling. Frustrated as an ER doctor and his marriage in trouble, he volunteers with a medical aid charity in the Congo. Soon disconsolate at the lives he cannot save in the desperate conditions of the region, he is shattered by a roadside confrontation with the mercenary Mai Mai that results in unthinkable losses. Back home in Seattle, he is haunted by his experiences...

When Judy Moody gets serious about protecting the environment, her little brother Stink thinks she is overdoing it, but she manages to inspire her third grade class to undertake an award-winning, environment-saving project.

A mother's words help a little boy imagine the sights and sounds of the seashore, even though he's never seen the ocean.

A lonely old man who waits each year to see the orcas swim past his house imparts his love of the whales to his granddaughter.

The Fool's Progress, the "fat masterpiece" as Edward Abbey labeled it, is his most important piece of writing: it reveals the complete Ed Abbey, from the green grass of his memory as a child in Appalachia to his approaching death in Tuscon at age sixty two. When his third wife abandons him in Tucson, boozing, misanthropic anarchist Henry Holyoak Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and sets off in a battered pick-up truck for his ancestral home in West...

For all curious readers, a lively introduction to radical ideas and discoveries that are transforming our knowledge of the universe. --Publisher

Traces the development of primitive societies showing why some groups advanced more rapidly than others and how this progression explains why various populations stabilize at specific phases of development while others continue to evolve.

"Wordplay with homonyms puts autumn on display and captures the art and science of season change"--

1994. In the desert near Tillman, Arizona, forty miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the "Terranauts," have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. Closely monitored by an all-seeing Mission Control, this New Eden is both an adventure in scientific discovery and a momentous...

Describes the various steps necessary for an astronaut to prepare for a flight into space and follows astronaut Linda Gardner as she trains for her space shuttle mission.